CMSC 838G - Fall 2006
Prof Guimbretière

Advanced Introduction to HCI

Proposed design (Due 3/29/07)

The goal of the second phase of your project assignment is for your group to establish the key characteristics of the design you will implement. You will be asked to write 3-4 pages (in 2 columns format) describing the key objectives (or goals) your design will focus on, how your design will serve them and report on a first round of evaluation.

What to do

Establish the goals of your design

The first step will be to refine the goals of your design. This correspond to the "Definition" phase of the design cycle we discussed in class. The design can address several objectives or goals, but as we have seen in class more focused designs are often more successful. One simple way to establish the main goals of your design is to first establish the list of personas you would like to serve and for each persona establish the key goals of this persona (see Chap 4 of "About Face 2.0" by Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann for more details).

Given the limited development time imposed by the class schedule, you are strongly encouraged to focus on addressing a small set of pertinent goals instead of trying to address too many goals at once.

Your first design elements

Once you have establish the goals of your design, you should decide how these goals will be reached. For this part you are asked to use ideation techniques describe in class (including brainstorming, story boarding and low-fidelity prototyping) to establish the key aspects of your design. This will cover both hardware (shape, size, physical interface...) and software interface.

First system mockups

Once you have settled on the key aspects of your design, you should build your first mockups. These mockups do not need to be fully functional, but instead should focus on validating the key aspects of your design. This include:

• Validating a specific hardware design (such as a hinge mechanism);

• Validating the overall flow of interaction (such as how to load and read a book in an ebook reader);

• Validating a specific sensing technique (such as a new capacitive sensor);

Any prototyping technique described in class can be used to create the prototype(s) you will need for this phase. As we have seen in the beginning of the class (for example in the IDEO video), it is often advantageous to build several mini-prototypes, each addressing a specific aspect of the overall design. In some cases, several prototypes (using different designs) might be needed to determine which solution will work best. In all case, you should focus on improving your understanding of what can or cannot be done so you know what to build during the next cycle.

Evaluation and finalized design

With your prototype(s) in hand, you should evaluate your design first among the members of your group then by asking another group in the class to play the role of your target. Please remember that to be successful an evaluation should be targeted and you should come prepared (see "Observing The User Experience" by Mike Kuniavsky for details).

With the information gathered during this critical review, you should put together your final design to be build during the next phase of the project. 

Deliverables

Your deliverable will be a 3-4 pages (two columns conference format) description of your design including:

• A clear description of your design goals, and how you established them;

• For each goal, a description of how your design will address this goal;

• For each key element of your design, a description of how you evaluated the feasibility of this aspect of your design. This description should include the different solutions you tried out as well as the results of your evaluation of each solutions.

• A description of your first system mockup including a description of how the system will be used in practice. If you wish, you might want submit a short video of the system in action;

• A report on your evaluation of your first system mockup, including the setting you used during the evaluation as well its findings

•  A description of the final design you are intending to implement. There is no need to build a new mockup for this part. Instead you can simply provides sketches, annotated pictures and drawings describing how the new design will look like and how it will be build.

You might wish to append this part to your existing project report. Please justify all your claims.

Important remarks

As it is clear from the description above, designing a new device requires making a large number of decisions which one will need to justify in the report. These justifications might have several sources such as: previous literature, small pilot studies, users observations and so on. As a result, it is important for you to document clearly the process by which you reach all your design decisions.

Presentation

Two to three group will be asked to present their work in class on the due date. Presentation should be 10 minutes long and will be followed by 10 minutes of questions/answers. It should include:

• A brief introduction of the topic,

• A presentation of how your project will contribute to the field (please includes key references),

• A description of your design and your rational for it,

• A conclusion.

While the presentation should focus on the substance rather than the form, a reasonable presentation style is expected.